Quotes About Evolution

Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.

In other words, HIV hasn't happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.

Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed.

The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat.

Now here's the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.

The more numerous we become, the more crowded, the more interconnected, the more demanding of resources, the more invasive of wild places, the more disruptive of richly diverse ecosystems—the closer we stand to the epidemic threshold for any new virus that probes us as a possible route to greater evolutionary success.

The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.

The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.

Darwin wrote: "organized beings represent a tree.

What makes a species of insect—or of mammal, or of microbe—capable of the outbreak phenomenon? That's a complicated question that the experts are still trying to answer.

Among the most important things to remember about evolution—and about its primary mechanism, natural selection, as limned by Darwin and his successors—is that it doesn't have purposes. It only has results. To

The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such

Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.

Bats come in many, many forms. The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such diversity might suggest that bats don't harbor more than their share of viruses; it could be, instead, that their viral burden is proportional to their share of all mammal diversity, and thus just seems surprisingly large.

Cualquiera que defienda el diseño inteligente en lugar de la evolución debería pararse a pensar en por qué Dios habría dedicado tal parte de Su inteligencia a diseñar los parásitos de la malaria.

But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.

Desde luego, todo tiene un origen; y, dado que los seres humanos somos un primate relativamente nuevo, ha resultado lógico suponer que nuestras enfermedades infecciosas más antiguas han llegado a nosotros - transformadas, al menor ligeramente, por la evolución- procedentes de otros huéspedes animales.

molecular phylogenetics.

Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

More precisely, he placed the most recent common ancestor of DRC60 and ZR59 in the year 1908, give or take a margin of error.

Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

To become a different kind of person is to experience the world in a different way. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.

Eventually, it can lead us to have compassion for everyone, when we see how we all must struggle with the downside of human nature. Everyone is crippled in some area, and everyone is somewhere on the path of evolution, some ahead of us, and some behind.